Interview Transcript
This is an interview with Jeannie Lythcott on July 17, 2006, at the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, about her
experience and involvement with the West African Smallpox Eradication
Project. The interview is being conducted as a part of a reunion marking
the 40th anniversary of the launch of the program. The interviewer is David
Sencer.
Sencer: Jeannie, do you want to tell me a little bit about your early
years? Where were you born, what were your parents like?
Lythcott: I was born in Leeds, in Yorkshire, England, and I was born in
Leeds because my mom had to go to the hospital. I was the only 1
of her 5 children who had to be delivered in a hospital.
We grew up in a little village called Rye Hill, partway
between Leeds and Sheffield, a coal-mining town. My dad was the
only child of coal miners, and he won a scholarship to go to the
local grammar school, but his parents wouldn't pay the fee-what
would be maybe a dollar, now-to go to that school. And so he was
down in the mine at 14.
He took himself to night school. He was drafted in World
War II. He got in the Royal Signals Corps, and when he got home,
he went to college on a program for servicemen. He became a
science teacher and grew to become the headmaster of the only
school in which he taught. So education for Dad was absolutely
prime.
Mom had gone to the local high school, and so they were
both incredibly bright folks, and with 5 children.
I was born in 1939, at the beginning of World War II, and
some of my earliest memories are about gas masks and being
evacuated. You know, bombs were dropped on Leeds.
I grew up speaking Yorkshire, and our teachers spent a
good 12 years trying to have us approximate the Queen 's
English. This is how Yorkshire sounds. I'm going to give you a
Yorkshire toast: [toast in Yorkshire, which Dr. Sencer can't
understand]
About 6% of students went to university in those days. I applied
for and was accepted to Majesty University. Because our family
was so poor, I got a scholarship from the government as a result
of the 1944 Education Act. The government paid every penny for
me-bus fare from home, food, everything-to go to university. If
that had not been the case, I couldn't have gone.
I taught in England for a couple of years and then decided
that I wanted to go around the world, knowing somehow that my
experience of education was limited by the British system. So my
thought was that I would teach in former British colonies, where
some things would be recognizable. And at that time, David, I
was going to end up this grand tour of the globe in America,
that being the far end of the spectrum. And after that, I was
going to go home and become headmistress of a school for
girls.
I began in Ghana. I arrived in August of 1962. George
Lythcott and his 4 teenage children, ages 12 to16, had arrived
in Accra with an American team the month before I got there. He
was there as Deputy Director of a medical research team to help
Ghana build a national health institute manned by Ghanaian
scientists and molded after NIH [National Institutes of Health].
We lived very close to each other. I met the family on
September 9, about a month after I arrived, and we became very,
very close very quickly. It's amazing.
George had to go back to the United States in October or
November of that year. Three of the children, Ruthie, George,
and Mike, were in boarding school in Achimota, so they would be
taken care of while he was gone. The youngest one, Steven, was
going to a day school, an American international school.
So I went to see George the night before he was to leave
for 9 weeks to go back to the United States. His household goods
hadn't yet arrived from America. We were relative strangers, you
understand. I sat there in his house helping him to pack his
bag, and he kept giving me money. He gave me 3 blank, signed
checks just in case anything happened to his children. I mean,
his trust in me from the start, it was amazing when I think
about it.
And so we worked side by side. I was there to teach
physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics to girls who were
given a scholarship. They were bypassing secondary school and
being prepared for a degree nursing program, which was unusual
in 1962. So that's what I was doing there, and continued to do,
until December 1965.
Kwame Nkrumah [the first Prime Minister of Ghana] had
fallen into disfavor with the American government, and as a
result of some of the things that had happened, the United
States decided to pull out most of George's team. There were 22
scientists of different disciplines there. The United States
decided to pull most of them out as a political statement, but
the Ghanaian scientist with whom they'd been working made a plea
to the American Ambassador at the time to say, "Can't we keep a
scientist-to-scientist relationship?" And so George stayed with
1 technician.
But I had upset the Ghanese government, so my contract was not
renewed in 1965.
Sencer: How did you upset them?
Lythcott: In the summer of '65, those who taught in this pre-nursing
program said that, for the first time, they were willing to
leave as a group (they were very close friends) to go on
vacation because they felt that they could leave the college in
my hands. We were on vacation, and they felt that they could
leave the administrative details to me and they would come back
at the beginning of school.
Around this time, we had administered an entrance exam to
over 2,000 girls from all over Ghana. We had announced in the
newspaper when the exam would be given and when we would
announce the results. And those results were to be given on a
specific date, maybe September 28 or something. While the women
were gone, the Minister of Education in the government called up
the college and wanted to know whether his niece had been
accepted for the pre-nursing program. And so my reply was that
the exams had been scored, but we hadn't done the final
analysis, and as we had reported in the paper, all of the
results would be available at the same time to the public on
September 28. I had the good sense to write that in a letter to
the director of the college. But he didn't like what I'd done;
he just didn't like it. But I stood my ground. So I wasn't
expelled from the country, but my contract wasn't renewed.
I'm not sure of the details of how this happened, but I
ended up working for NIH in Ghana for 6 months on the Burkett's
tumor project. I was responsible for getting the tissue samples,
getting the osmium tetroxide, and we did 2 other lab
manifuplations and then. I hand-carried the samples in dry ice
to a plane at midnight to get to Washington, D.C. So that was
my last 6 months in Ghana.
And then, in November or December of '65, George met D. A.
[Donald A. Henderson] in New York somewhere, and they'd talked
about the smallpox program. So, in January and February, I
think, he was roaming around the 20 countries to be in the
eradication effort, getting the agreements signed.
We got married in Ghana on January 17, 1966, in an
incredible ceremony.
So there I was. George headed off to get these agreements
signed. We came back to Atlanta in that summer to help get the
team oriented to Africa..
So those are my beginnings.
Let me tell you 1 other thing. It relates to where I am
now. When I was at the University of Manchester, I had applied,
on the basis of recommendation from my professor, for a Ph.D.
program in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.
There was an interesting morphological problem. There was
a weed in the prairies; when you pulled up a plant, if you left
any little piece of root, each root had the possibility of
making a whole new plant. So the weed was noxious from that
point of view. They wanted somebody to study that plant from a
morphological perspective.
So I got the scholarship. It paid for everything, but I
couldn't afford to get there. The professor said he made every
effort to try to get me there and found a scholarship from the
Dreyfus Company, $1,600, $1,700, something like that. It was a
scholarship for post-university work at any college or
university in our dominions or colonies, but it stipulated that
it was for a male student. And they said they were so happy if
somebody would try to change it, but it would take them 5 years.
So I went into teaching.
Sencer: You got married instead.
Lythcott: Yes. I met George. That derailed my whole plan. Yes.
Sencer: You came here in '66 for the training course?
Lythcott: Yes, yes.
Sencer: Was this your first experience in the States?
Lythcott: No. My first time in the United States was 1968. We'd been
married in '66, and I was still a British citizen. We found out
that when an American official was part of the diplomatic corps,
marries an alien overseas, and is returning to post overseas,
that the residency requirement for US citizenship is waived,
which makes good sense. Also, you can be naturalized in any
court that's meeting. So in 1968, I took all of the steps to
come in on an immigration visa. I had studied up the kazoo. We
found out that the federal court was meeting in Washington, D.C.
I was in New York, pregnant, so I went up for the day to
Washington, D.C. to take this exam. I took the oath, in a very
moving ceremony.
It came time for the exam. Well, I had studied. This judge
sat there, and he said, "How many arms of government?" "What do
we call this form of government?" Then the next question was,
"So tell me what you know about the Executive Branch." And in
all seriousness, I said to him, "You mean everything I know?"
And he looked at me, over the top of his glasses, and he said,
"Well, why don't you just start, and I'll tell you when to
stop." Well, I started, and I had this down. It was like
unpacking the files from memory, you know, and so on and so on I
went. He didn't ask me another single question. It was amazing.
Sencer: So, in the smallpox program when you went back after '66,
George had traveled around getting the agreements signed.
Lythcott: Right.
Sencer: And then what happened?
Lythcott: Most of the agreements were signed, but not all, when we came
back for the training program here in 1966. Nigeria was still
the very difficult one. And if I recall, 50% of the population
was in Nigeria, and I don't know if 50% of the smallpox cases
were there also, but without Nigeria, this program made no good
sense.
Back then, CDC had a program in Atlanta for the families
while the guys were going through their training. There were
some cultural events for children.
So George went off for a week to Nigeria to get the
agreement signed. But when he got there, all of these
hostilities between the north and the east had just erupted, and
nobody, but nobody, was interested in thinking about a smallpox
eradication-measles control program.
So it is my understanding that he did everything that he
could. And people would check in with him. It wasn't easy to
make long-distance calls back in those days. You could hear the
ocean, I think, in the background. You had to book your call 3
hours ahead of time. And so, when we knew a call had been
booked, I would actually be in the hallway, waiting. D. A. and
Billy and various people would be there, and I'd just wait in
the hall outside for messages.
George was an incredibly social person; he had people skills up
the kazoo. It's funny, because at the same time, he was also
very much of a homebody and a loner. He would say often things
like, "I don't care about anything else, just as long as I've
got you and my baby at home." But when he was out there, he had
people skills up the kazoo. And people found themselves talking
to him easily. He adored women, and women adored him.
From his days in Ghana, he knew about the underworld, you
know, those CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] spies, and so on.
Actually, the CIA tried to recruit George, and George came home
and told me about all of it. But he told some of the things that
they knew about him and about me, and I said, "I don't think you
need to be a part of that." So he gave it up, although it would
have meant a whole lot of money, which would have been helpful
with 4 children.
But he was used to that, sort of thinking, where messages
can be passed back and forth that can ameliorate situations
before they erupt. He was used to that sort of level of
conversation.
So George was at a cocktail party in Lagos He'd been
there about 6 or 7 weeks. And nobody knew much about the new
young leader of Nigeria, General Yakubu Gowan. As president of
the federation, he was in the middle of Yoruba country, but he
was from the Jos Plateau. So he didn't have his own people, his
own tribe, around him. So it must have been very tenuous for him
in the beginning. And so it was hard for George to find
connections with him because there weren't many in that milieu.
So George was at this party, chitchatting with the wife of
one of the Yoruba diplomats there whom he'd come to know. And
George said to this lady-it was very serendipitous-"He's such a
handsome young man. And he's not married, I hope. This is the
army," some conversation like this. And the woman leaned over
and she said, "Oh, no, he has a girlfriend." And so it was
through that contact that George then arranged an introduction
with. the girlfriend [I believe mistress would be a more apt
term. djs]
And so George told the young woman about the smallpox
program, what it would mean to children in all the 20 countries,
and that if Nigeria didn't sign, there would be no program. He
gave her that understanding, and she went to the President the
next day, and there it was the signed agreement.. Yeah.
Sencer: As you say, he had people skills.
Lythcott: Oh, he did, he did.
Sencer: Did you do much traveling with George, or were you a homebody?
Lythcott: I did some, but not much. Once the civil war erupted, we were
told by the American government that they were not requiring
dependents to leave but that if we left, we couldn't come back.
So I actually did very little traveling. I went to Abidjan, to
that meeting.
And then little Julie was born in November of 1967.
Sencer: Where was she born?
Lythcott: In Lagos, Nigeria.
Sencer: Which hospital?
Lythcott: It was a Nigerian hospital on the mainland. She was delivered
by midwives at the hospital. George brought my mother from
England to visit us, so she came for about 3 weeks, the first
and only time she ever flew in an airplane. So, of necessity, we
were home.
Sencer: You want to tell us some of George's printable exploits?
Lythcott: One that I didn't tell the other night was about Colonel
Labusquiere leader of OCEAC [Organization de Coordination pur
la Lutte contre Endemies d'Afrique Central]; he was a formidable
character. As I remember it, he wasn't at all persuaded that the
Americans had any role in the OCEAC countries; he thought that
the French were doing just fine, thank you very much. In the
case of smallpox, I think he was absolutely right, but measles
control was something he would gladly give up. But as George
used to describe him, the Colonel was just puffed up with
national pride. Any notions that Americans were going to be
coming to help them were just impossible.
So we were in Lagos, and we got a call that Colonel
Labusquiere, his wife, and his mother, who was traveling with
them from France to visit them in Cameroon (I think that's where
they lived), were going to have to lay over in Lagos, Nigeria,
because there was something wrong. They couldn't fly all the
way. I don't know what it was. But they were arriving in Lagos,
and of course they would stay with us. And I was in a panic now.
What are we going to do? So we've got Labusquiere, this
formidable character. As far as I knew, he spoke very little
English. And his mother was coming too.
Sencer: Right.
Lythcott: So I put the word out among the wives of those who worked in
the regional office-Bonnie Flanders [Bonnie Jean Flanders], Ilze
[Ilze Henderson], and Dotty Hicks [Dorothy Hicks] and so on-that
if anybody, anywhere, had any French literature-magazines,
books, anything-that I could at least put in their rooms, to let
me know. One of them came up with a magazine, and I got the
guestrooms ready. And you know how they did things in 1966. So I
put the magazine down on the bedside table for the mother, and
just flipped it open to a page, and placed it next to a little
vase of flowers. It turns out the page depicted a vineyard, and
this was their property. So completely serendipitous! There it
was. The next morning, the mother said, "How did you know?"
So they come, we're struggling through, in French. You
know, the astonishing thing about George was that he didn't
speak other languages, at least not at this point. He would have
a few words here and there, but that was a tribute to his people
skills as well. It was all eye contact and body language.
Anyway, we're struggling through dinner. I think Ilze and
Rafe [Ralph H. Henderson] came. I was struggling with my French.
I hadn't used it in a long, long time, but it seemed to be okay.
And we were getting through. It was a kind of a nice occasion.
So the next morning, at breakfast, we got up. I mentioned
that I hoped that they had spent a pleasant night, and so on.
And all of a sudden the colonel begins speaking in English that
is much better than my French. That old son-of-a-gun.
Sencer: Yeah.
Lythcott: And so he said that it had been a wonderful visit, and he said
the first thing that he needed to do was to toast George because
in one 24-hour period, this man had caused his mother and his
wife to fall in love.. And that's when the conversation about
the vineyards came up.
He thanked us for the evening and how they appreciated us
trying to put this together. And George always thought that was
a turning point in that relationship.
You have all of the other stories about the passports and
things, I'm sure.
Sencer: Well, we don't have them in your words. Actually, I don't think
those were recorded the other night, about filling in his
passport.
Lythcott: George was traveling with Jay Friedman [Jay S. Friedman]. I
think they were trying to go into Abidjan. George realized, as
he's going up to passport control, that this [unclear]. "I still
have these passports. Maybe I should send those to CDC. That
would be fun, wouldn't it?" with all the extra pages stuck in,
and so on and so on. And so he looked and found that his visa
had expired the day before. What was he going to do?
Somebody else goes through, and then George comes along.
The passport officer was a young woman. So George said to her,
in his own inimitable style, "Hello, honey. How are you doing?
May I borrow your pen?" And so she said, "Here's one." So she
took out a pen, gave it to George, and on the desk right in
front of her, he drew around the outside edge of the visa and
changed the date. So the date was, I don't know, tomorrow. So if
it said the 17th, he changed it to the 19th or something, right
there. And he gave her his passport, returned her pen, and she
said, "Fine, thank you very much. Have a good day, big boy."
Another time I think he just ripped out the old page of
his passport with the old visas that were attached and put it in
his passport.
And then there was the time, it was Julie's first
birthday, so November 28, 1968, George had been at a conference
with a whole lot of other people in Congo Brazzaville. I'm not
sure why, but George didn't get on the plane to come to Lagos as
we had thought. But he had let me know that he had invited 3
Russian physicians to Thanksgiving at our house.
This was a big deal because George cooked the turkey.
George could cook like you wouldn't believe. He put it on a spit
on the grill outside. And I was allowed nowhere near this
machine.
So I expecting George home, and he didn't come, and about
10 o'clock in the morning, the 3 Russian physicians arrived. And
I'm panicking a little bit. I have the turkey all dressed, it's
all ready to go, but I haven't heard from George. It's Julie's
first birthday. I knew he was going to be there if he could. And
nobody seemed to know what had happened to him.
Finally, about noon, totally unexpectedly, George breezed
in through the front door, dropped his suitcase and his coat,
and went right into the kitchen and said, "Is the turkey ready?"
and I said, "Yes." And so I followed behind him, and he said,
"Did the Russians come?" I said, "Yes, they're outside by the
pool." And he said, "Oh, by the way, your brother said to say
hello." My brothers are both in England. It made no sense to me.
But later, as I got the story, he had persuaded the people
in Congo Brazzaville that he absolutely had to get to Lagos,
Nigeria, he just had to. And so they entered into this whole
problem-solving with him. You know, that was the art, that he
got people to problem-solve with him. So they said, "Well, we
can't get you to Lagos, but we can get you to Rome, and maybe
you can get home from Rome." Know this. This was all on the
ticket from Congo Brazzaville to Lagos, so there was no extra
charge or anything involved here.
And so he got to Rome, and the same spiel, and he tells a
story and, of course, he's been talking to the stewardesses on
the plane. It's like he's got the whole world looking out for
him. They sent him to London in time to get the flight-BOAC, I
think it was-from London to Nigeria. While he was in London, he
called my brother. Oh, man.
Sencer: What were some of your high points in Africa, besides having
Julie?
Lythcott: Well, that was definitely the high point.
I think the only big conference that I knew about was the
one that we had in '69 in Lagos. It must have been in the
spring. Most of the photographs that I sent are from that
conference. I remember 2 things about that conference.
One is that George was bound and determined to have a
diplomatic coup, which was that all of these contiguous
countries would finally agree that a smallpox outbreak could be
attended to by the smallpox vaccination team that was closest to
the site, regardless of which side of the border the team was
on. And this was huge. So that from Nigeria, you could go into
Niger, and vice versa, for the purpose of containing smallpox.
And they reached that agreement at that meeting. So that was a
high point for George.
The other thing was that George had arranged-he was so
proud of this-for a sophisticated method of simultaneous
translation. Translators were sent in from Geneva, and they were
set up in little booths. But, of course, it was dependent on the
electricity working, and West Africa being West Africa at the
time, electricity working was not something that you could count
on. So George had requested that the translators be able to move
into consecutive translation as well. Well, that's what
happened. The electricity went out.
And I have this fabulous memory of these translations,
which were really improvisational performances. When the
translator was translating from the French into English, the
shoulders would go back and be squared, the neck would be
buttoned up, elbows tucked in, and the correct accent. And then
the same guy, when translating from English to French, would
tousle his hair, undo his shirt, and he'd be scratching and all
kinds of things. It was an absolutely wonderful performance.
I sought them out afterwards at the cocktail party, and
they said what a joy it was for them to go back to this old
skill that they used to have but didn't get to use anymore.
Sencer: Was one of them mustached?
Lythcott: Definitely. The other was a young woman who was on one of those
photographs. I remembered her name: Eleanor Trench I think one
of them may have been in that photograph.
Sencer: The mustached one was one of the WHO's [World Health
Organization] translators, and he was just magnificent, just
magnificent.
Lythcott: It must have been him.
Sencer: As you said, he would fall right into whichever language he was
working in. He was great.
Why do you think things worked so well in Africa, or
worked as well as they did?
Lythcott: You know, that's a complicated question. But I was thinking
about Bill Foege's presentation, the final one at the seminar
the other day. Bill's thought was that nobody really believed
that they could pull it off. There may have been an exception
because I know George believed it.
He came back from meeting with D. A., and he didn't say,
"We're going to try to eradicate smallpox." He said, "We're
going to eradicate smallpox," you know-and control measles. The
question for him was not whether it could be done. It was just,
how in the world are we going to get it done? So he believed it.
I don't know who did the interviewing, but given the
issues of racism and lack of cultural sensitivity in our nation
at that time, the selection of those young folks was amazing.
But it also may have been their youth. Because they were very
young, you know. When you're 23, 24, 28 years old and if you're
smart, you do believe you can do anything. I thought I could run
any school in the world better than anybody else who was doing
it at that time.
Sencer: You probably could.
Lythcott: Yeah. So it's that chutzpah of youth.
But I think the fact that there was a very small American
presence in each country was a fabulous decision. I think if
there'd been 10 CDCers per country, they would have coalesced
into a tight little team, whereas being only 1 or 2, they
trained their counterparts and worked with them; that was
critical to this process. But because there was usually only 1
in every country and the medical officer covered several
countries, there was a sense that you were not entirely
isolated.
And that's why George traveled 70% of the time. I
calculated it. He was gone from Lagos 70% of the time. He needed
to do that. He needed to have them know that somebody was on the
ground caring about things. And, you know, he did a lot of
caring for families. . So I think it was that. So there was the
animus of can-do.
I think the other thing was that there was probably a
little of that rambunctious devilry in all of these young people-
sort of an obstinacy that, if you hit a wall, it wasn't going to
get you down. It was just something to get over. I think there
was that.
Clearly, for the team from the United States, that link,
also incredibly tenuous-you know, how long it took to make an
overnight call; you sent telegrams, and relied on a way of
communicating that seems so old when we compare it to today's
world-but that link, tenuous as it was, was also incredibly
strong. I don't think for a minute that George ever thought that
there was anyone back in the United States that would say no,
would say we can't do it. It was that can-do spirit again.
And you have to give credit truly to the country nationals
also. It wouldn't have worked if they hadn't wanted it to work.
There were more ways than we could ever invent in our culture
for not getting it done in West Africa.
Do you remember when Rafe and somebody went to the
subcontinent to try to help WHO get that off the ground? I think
they were there for about 3 weeks for an initial conversation
with the Ministry of Health. So for 3 weeks, they'd met with the
Minister of Health. He had been very courteous, very engaging.
They'd had wonderful conversations. But there wasn't anything
happening, nothing! And it was about time for them to come home.
They had reached a level of maximum frustration, so they
requested a meeting with him. And he said, "Welcome, and good
journey home" and so on. And they said, "Before we go, we need
to tell you how frustrating this is. We thought we might be able
to go home and report that something had been done." And he said-
and this is the line, the actual quote-"What would you do if a
friend, as a gift, gave you an elephant? We can't cope with that
big thing!"
So the country nationals, they could have found ways to
not get it done, to not enter into the problem-solving. And you
have to believe that it was because they knew what a gift it was
to keep children well.
Sencer: I'm now giving editorial comment. So many of the people that
went from the United States had worked in state health
departments, where they saw their job not to be the leader, but
to get behind the leader and gently push: Let's get this done;
let's get this done. And I think a lot of that was part of the
success in Africa, that they recognized the primacy of the
native leaders.
Lythcott: Yes.
Sencer: And recognized that there were ways to get them to move.
Lythcott: Mm-hmm, yeah.
Sencer: I notice you're wearing a bracelet.
Lythcott: Yes.
Sencer: Tell me about it.
Lythcott: I will.
One of the extraordinary things about that time, which is
evident for all of us who came this weekend, is that it was a
short time in our lives. I'm 67 years old. The smallpox program
was 3 years; Ghana, before that, lasted 4 years. Seven years is
a very small part of a lifetime, but it was life-changing. We
all learned things. We all learned a way of being there. We
weren't there as art collectors; we weren't there out of
curiosity. We were there as national, you know, the old National
Geographic notion of, will there be curiosities?
Jim Lewis [James O. Lewis] was telling a story on Saturday
night about how the truck he was in had driven into this pond or
this mud in the road, and the driver had assured them that they
would get out. They were knee-deep in mud. People just turned up
on bicycles and helped them get this truck out of the mud and
refused payment and seemed offended to having even been offered
it. And Jim said that since then, he always stops to help on the
roadside. So, my point being that we all have remembrances of
that.
So, I've put on umpteen numbers of pounds, so I can't wear
my African clothing anymore. I just have 1 dress that I can
wear. But I wear it often. When I put it on, it puts me back in
that part of the world.
So the other day I was co-teaching a course with a
professor friend of mine at Stanford. He was delayed
considerably. When he got there, he said he'd had trouble with
his car on the way. I said, "Now I'm going to use an Africanism
at Stanford." He had trouble with his car. And my immediate
response was, "Oh, sorry." And he said, "Don't be sorry. It's
not your fault." And I said, "It's the West African sorry,"
sorry that the world did this to you.
Another memory, when Georgia died. In Nigeria, if they
came to your office and you weren't there, there was this
phrase, "I came and I met your absence." It's the notion that
there's a presence of your absence as well as the absence of
your presence. And they're not the same.
Sencer: You mentioned life-changing.. How did it change your life?
Lythcott: It taught me that I needed to revise my sense of my own
country. I needed to give up this notion of glorious British
history and acknowledge that some of British history was an
inglorious thing. Nobody had taught me in England about our role
in the slave trade, or that there even was one. I specialized in
the sciences. I gave up studying history at Henry VII to
specialize in the sciences. But I don't think that they taught
that in British schools anyway. How the raj came to be is an
incredibly important issue. I had to reshape how I walked on
planet Earth. So I think that that made me, as a human being,
open to the difficulty of understanding cross-cultures and being
with cross-cultures. One of the things that we talk about in
academia is this notion of white privilege and how hard it is
when you are in the position of privilege, which is almost
always tacit. You just don't know yourself well enough to be
think across cultures. So I think it did that for me.
And the experience taught me the role of sharing, of not
holding onto objects too hard, of the extended family, of what
you have you have to share, and that kind of thing. And so, in
lots of ways, George and I became who we were as a result of
being in Africa.
So I just wanted to say that now, Julie, our daughter, and
her husband and her 2 children, and I pooled our resources and
we bought a house together in Palo Alto. We never could have
done it on our own resources. So we're living together under the
same roof, a situation fraught with potential dangers, you know,
the old mother-daughter thing, your mother-in-law. And we said
at the outset that we knew it was going to be difficult and that
we wouldn't hide it under the table. We'd make sure that we put
it on top.
It's been such an incredible journey for Julie and I.
Julie is all set to write a book about it.
One of the incredible things about George was that he
never stopped living. He changed his mind on some really big
things as an older person, as a 60-odd-year-old, as a 72-year-
old. It's quite astonishing, you know. But I think once you've
been in a situation where your whole world, the things that
you're sure about, have to be totally examined, you can see
yourself whole and confident and competent, having gone through
that change.
Sencer: Yes. What's Julie doing now?
Lythcott: Julie is dean of freshmen at Stanford, and just newly promoted
to associate vice-provost. She just completed her 4th year, and
they absolutely adore her. Every year they've changed her role
and brought her more into the centrality of what's happening at
the university.
This year, one of the things she initiated was that the
incoming freshmen would read 3 books, or they could choose 1 of
3. Stanford will have the authors there, during orientation, so
that there will be a conversation between the authors and the
freshmen. They chose books on Afghanistan, Haiti, and a
collection of short stories about mothers and daughters.
Sencer: Carrying On the Tradition.
Lythcott: Carrying On the Tradition. That's exactly right. She has
George's oratorical skills, and she has George's charisma.
You know, I saw George walk into a typical West African
cocktail party (that's how people there spent their evenings),
into a gathering of 80 people, and the room changed when he
walked in. He had that power. Julie has that power too.
Sencer: I'll tell you a story about George. We were in Mali and going
out to the Dogon country. This was at the time of the 25th
millionth vaccination. And we stopped at a little rest house way
out in the middle of nowhere. At that time, Mali was very
Chinese dominated. We walked in to the rest house. George was in
a big orange jumpsuit. There were 3 Chinese in there, and they
came over to him thinking him to be Malian, and George said,
"Howdy, brothers!" And those Chinese turned tail and left,
realizing he was an American.
Lythcott: Oh, man! Yeah.
George was with the first team that went into China after
Nixon went. And then he went a second time. The second time, he
was walking on the Great Wall of China, and he heard someone
call out behind him, "George Lythcott?" Can't help
Can I just tell you how D.A. looked after us in Atlanta?
Sencer: Please.
Lythcott: We were living in a motel, and D. A. was persuaded that
trouble was brewing in the motel. We were breaking the
segregation laws in several states at that time. I know that.
And so he moved us for the duration to the apartment of at
Unitarian minister.
And then, while we were still here, George had to go to
Washington for some reason, I'm not sure why. We were newly
married that year, and I had hardly seen George. You know, he'd
been roaming around West and Central Africa since we got
married. Three days after we got married, he left. And then he
was gone for 9 weeks in the summer. So George said, "I want you
to come with me." The idea was that we would go on the overnight
train from Atlanta to Washington, getting into the Washington on
the sleeper train at 6:30 in the morning. But D. A. was very
worried about us, as was George. So they got the plan together,
which was that both George and D. A-and I don't know how tall D.
A. is, about 6'; George was 6'2½"-with their raincoats on,
unbuttoned, would get to the railroad station, with me, and then
we would walk fast. I'm 5'½" tall. Their raincoats would flap
open, and I would be hidden behind these raincoat flaps, and
they would hustle me on the train. And that's what they did. And
all was well.
And then the last thing involved the chairman of the
department in Oklahoma. He had come from Mississippi and had
been told at his interview, "We have a black American on the
faculty. How do you feel about it?"And the man had said, "Oh,
just fine, just fine." And then a week or 2 after he became
department chair, he called George in and said, "You need to
know that I can't have anyone on my faculty whom I can't invite
home to dinner."
Later, that same guy applied for a position to Johns
Hopkins. All we knew was George got a brown paper envelope. In
it was a letter of application from this guy, and D. A.'s
response on a little office memo. D. A. just wrote on it, "Turn
of the screw." So D. A. looked after us in really important
ways.
Sencer: Yes.
Well, thank you for talking.
Lythcott: Oh, you're welcome.
Sencer: And we'll sign off now at 10:25. Thank you very much.
Lythcott: Thank you.
# # #
Jeannie Lythcott Oral History
Jeannie Lythcott interviewed by
David Sencer
July 16, 2006
Jeannie Lythcott, wife of George Lythcott, who served as --- tells of being a white woman married to a Black man, both in United States and Africa. Jeannie, originally from England, tells how she came to work in Ghana and met and married George. She narrates some of her husband's escapades working for the Smallpox Eradication Program and how it changed her life.
